


Camphor Wood

by Bitsy



Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-21
Updated: 2010-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-10 17:23:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitsy/pseuds/Bitsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's the only thing he ever gave me, apart from...apart from his disappointment!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Camphor Wood

"So."

"...So."

"...Everything...going well, son?"

They both knew it wasn't. They both knew it was miserable and hopeless. They both knew that Arnold's abject failures were compounding, and then compounding again, gathering momentum on a rapid downhill fall. He'd been with the company a grand total of eight years, and in that entire eight years, he'd had no promotions, no successes, nothing nothing nothing. If he were a bank, he didn't even have enough capital to get out of bed in the morning, let alone open the doors to customers. There wasn't even a distant speck on the horizon to indicate a sunrise. Hell, he'd take a moonrise! A distant star twinkling somewhere, some ray of light and hope to keep him going. But, no, all he had was the eternal blackness of a night of perpetual failure.

"Fine. Everything's fine, father."

"Mmm. Good."

Another awkward silence, as the two men sat together in the family's living room. They had the same postures, actually. Both tense and straight against the cushions, both with their hands resting on their thighs. Mr. Rimmer's hair, even with most of it missing, curled tightly at the nape of his neck. No matter how short he cut it, no matter how much he lost, what remained always curled. Rimmer had noticed years before that his brothers' hair didn't do that. Lucky gits, taking after mum's side of the family...

He was home for a visit, one of those rare, horrible occasions where he couldn't dodge it anymore. Years would pass without, and then suddenly he'd be drawn back home again, for reasons nobody could adequately explain, drawn there like a fruit fly to a slightly diseased lime tree. He would suffer his mother's brittle smirks, his father's quiet rage and madness, his brothers' outrageous and insulting successes. After he'd declared his emancipation at the age of fourteen, he'd tried so hard to go on without them, and yet...and yet...

Mum bustled in with tea, gone slightly cold, and served the both of them perfunctorily, like she had better things to do with her time. Probably one of the visiting officers down the port. In fact, yes, there she went, slapping a flowered hat on top of her immaculate coif, mouthing vague generalities about doing a grocery shop, and then vanishing out the door, leaving father and son alone, totally alone, for the first time in years.

"Still a third technician, then?" were the words pronounced after another five minutes of awkward, tea-filled silence. Rimmer felt the bile rise in the back of his throat, and gulped it down.

"Erm...yes." Failure. Such a bloody failure. He could almost feel the disappointment radiating off his father, like a tanning salon bed. An entire spectrum of UV disappointment, hot and invisible and painful. John wasn't a disappointment. He was a test pilot. Howard wasn't a disappointment. He was a captain at the age of twenty-eight. Frank wasn't a disappointment. He was second officer at the age of twenty-six. But as for Arnold, oh. Oh, what a disappointment. Twenty-five years old, with the company eight years, and still jamming 14-Bs up chicken soup machine nozzles. Sheepishly, he grinned at his father, more of a grimace of pain than an actual smile. His father just stared at him, as if he had no idea what that particular arrangement of facial muscles was supposed to mean. The grin slid off his face, and he blushed, dropping his glance to the floor.

It would have been tolerable, he thought to himself, if he hadn't just gotten his last pink slip from the corps examiner's office. He had seven of them, now. Just a few more and he could deal himself a fair hand of gin rummy. It would have been tolerable to be able to arrive home and say, "Yes, still a third technician, but I've got my exams coming up, and I'll pass this time, you'll see." But, no, he had to schedule the trip for _after_ his exams, and after he'd received the results. No hope again for another entire year, nothing to show to his family except more failure.

It would have even been tolerable, he thought to himself, if he hadn't just gotten word earlier in the week that Daley, his bunkmate, had put in for a transfer to another bunking situation. He'd thought he'd gotten on quite well with Daley, really. They even had civil conversations at times, and never had any heated words. But apparently Daley hated his guts. Hated his guts so much that, according to the rumour mill, Daley gone to the captain and said that if he didn't get his transfer, he was going to dance naked down corridor 332, singing ribald songs about the captain's sexual proclivities. Apparently the threat worked, because nobody wanted to see Daley naked.

Rimmer had seen Daley naked, and sorely wished he hadn't. Gorillas were less hirsute.

"Come with me, son."

The words snapped Rimmer out of his funk, and he looked up at his father in surprise. He stood up automatically, well trained since childhood to obey his father's commands. Commands like, "Stand up straight when I speak to you!" and "Don't touch that food until you've answered the question!" and "Stop sniveling and get on the rack!" Rimmer towered over his father at six foot two inches, a full foot taller than the man who tormented him so easily. And it never even once occurred to Rimmer that he was bigger and stronger than his father, as it had never occurred to any of his brothers. Hell, John could have torn the little squirt apart with his bare hands, what with his black belt in ju-jitsu.

His father strode upstairs, a modern-day Napoleon in a battered mac, head high, back ramrod straight. Mr. Rimmer didn't walk so much as march, marching here and there throughout his house, making his miniature presence felt, even if he was only showing off for the walls and pictures. _You were always watched,_ seemed to be the unspoken lesson. If not by other people, than by your dead ancestors, or possibly even God Almighty Himself. No wonder Arnold was so neurotic; he felt the weight of centuries of ghosts peering over his shoulder at all times.

Mr. Rimmer goosestepped into the back bedroom, his room that he shared with his not-so-perfect wife. Arnold hesitated in the doorway. Going into his parents' room was strictly forbidden, had been since he was a very small boy. Even with an express invitation, he was nervous about going in. But he swallowed that back and followed. Even if it was only three paces. That was three paces enough. He watched as his father went to a beautiful trunk at the foot of the bed. The camphor wood chest. The utterly exquisite and utterly untouchable camphor wood chest that had been in the family for years. Nobody was allowed to even touch it, not even his mum. Mr. Rimmer only handled it with gloves on. But he had no gloves on now.

"This was your great-grandfather's, you know," he began without any sort of indication as to why he was bringing this topic up. "Thaddeus A. Rimmer. Great man. Helped establish the colony here on Io."

"What did the A stand for?" Arnold asked, to cover his confusion.

His father smiled grimly. "Your mother never told you? Stood for Arnold."

Rimmer blinked. He'd known about his soi-distant great-grandfather, but had only ever heard the initial, and not the full nomenclature. So he was named after that great man, and he'd never known it. Those ghosts over his shoulder were even heavier than he'd originally thought.

"Oh." There really wasn't much more to say after that. Nervously, he licked his lips and glanced away, as he was all too well aware that he'd brought so much shame to his name.

"I want you to have this, son."

The words made no sense. Oh, certainly they were arranged in the proper order, with all the necessary nouns and verbs and such in the right places. But they simply refused to register in his brain. They bounced around in mucky little clusters, ricocheting off the back of his skull and scrambling themselves into nonsense.

"What?"

Mr. Rimmer sighed, and sank down to sit on the bed. Arnold had never seen his father sigh, not ever. It shook him to his very core, and his eyes went wide. For the first time ever, he found himself realising that his father was _old._ He'd slid past middle age and right into senility, without any sort of grace or dignity. He had to be...what, sixty-eight now? Sixty-nine? He was a good ten years older than mum, at least, but of course she told everybody that she was thirty-nine, which meant she had John at the age of four, but whatever.

"Father, what are you...?"

"Just let me have my say," was the quiet, defeated answer. And that quiet, defeated tone frightened Rimmer even more than the sigh. Something was dreadfully wrong, and Rimmer had a feeling that it was going to somehow turn out to be his fault.

"There comes a point in a man's life when he has to...close up shop, as it were. Balance the ledgers. I'm...not well."

If the ground beneath him suddenly cracked open and swallowed him whole, Rimmer would not be more shocked. This was completely unexpected. If you had told him yesterday that his father was dying, he would have said good riddance to the balding twat. But, deep within his stunted soul, the very small boy who was always seeking his father's approval would have been weeping.

"What's...what's wrong?"

"Oh, you know doctors. They like to stand over you and patronise you and then give you a little placebo pill so you'll get out of their nice clean offices. They don't know what's wrong with me. But the headaches are getting worse."

Rimmer nodded numbly. His father's headaches were legendary, and all four of the Rimmer boys had learned at an early age not to bring them on. Otherwise, his headache would become their headache in a head-spinningly fast manner.

His father continued. "I want you to have his trunk, son. He gave it to my father, his oldest son. Then my father gave it to me, his oldest. It should stay in the family."

Sweating, Rimmer rubbed a hand across his face, not really wanting to comprehend what was being said here. "But...but why _me?_ I'm...I'm the _youngest._ Why aren't you giving it to John?"

There was a long, long pause. Universes were born and died in that pause. Entire worlds were created and destroyed. Religions rose and fell. And there was another sad, defeated sigh out of Mr. Rimmer. He looked up from his perch on the bed, craning his neck to look up at his son, his ancient face yellow like parchment paper.

"Well...John...he's a test pilot, you know. Never in one place for very long. Dangerous line of work. He wouldn't be able to look after it like you would."

And in that moment, Rimmer understood something about his family that he'd never wanted to understand. His mother's extra-marital activities were more blatant than previously suspected. His brothers weren't his full brothers. And he was the only biological son of this sad, short, bald, megalomaniacal lunatic perched on the bed. He slammed that knowledge out of the front of his head, shuttling it to a dark recess somewhere, shutting the door behind it and locking it away for good. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to see. He wanted this to be over with so he could go away and never come back.

...And, being the weasel that he was, he also wanted that trunk. It _was_ beautiful, after all, and had to be worth an absolute fortune. He'd never owned anything this nice, and wanted to give it a go.

"Thank you, father," he said woodenly, nodding his head. "I'll look after it. I'm...sorry you're not feeling well."

His father waved this off, the defeat vanishing, to be replaced with annoyance. That was sentimental rubbish, and he wouldn't stand for it. Standing up, he crossed the room past his son. But he paused for a moment, facing away from Arnold, with his hand on his son's wrist.

"Don't tell your mother," he whispered, and then continued moving out the door.

Don't tell her what? That he had the trunk? That he knew she was a shameless hussy? That father was ill? Well, that was no change; he never spoke to his mother about anything of importance in any event. Alone in the forbidden back bedroom, Rimmer moved to the trunk and went to lift it, to get it out of the house.

...Damn thing must have weighed a tonne! Solid camphor wood, of course it did. Just like his father, damn his eyes, to give him a gift he couldn't even move and then leave him to figure out how to do it. Couldn't even lend him the use of a hand truck or something. Git.


End file.
